title: Targeting and tinkering with interaction  networks.
abstract: Biological interaction networks have been in the scientific limelight for nearly a decade. Increasingly, the concept of network biology and its various applications are becoming more commonplace in the community. Recent years have seen networks move from pretty pictures with limited application to solid concepts that are increasingly used to understand the fundamentals of biology. They are no longer merely results of postgenome analysis projects, but are now the starting point of many of the most exciting new scientific developments. We discuss here recent progress in identifying and understanding interaction networks, new tools that use them in predictive ways in exciting areas of biology, and how they have become the focus of many efforts to study, design and tinker with biological systems, with applications in biomedicine, bioengineering, ecology and beyond.
authors.affiliation: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Meyerhofstrasse 1, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany. russell@embl.de
authors.forename: Robert B
authors.initials: RB
authors.lastname: Russell
authors.forename: Patrick
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Aloy
mesh_terms: D004249:DNA Damage / Q000187:drug effects; D004268:DNA-Binding Proteins / Q000378:metabolism; D016503:Drug Delivery Systems; D006801:Humans; D011506:Proteins / Q000737:chemistry* / Q000378:metabolism*; D051736:Proto-Oncogene Proteins c-mdm2 / Q000378:metabolism; D049490:Systems Biology / Q000379:methods*
chemical_list: D004268:DNA-Binding Proteins; C478985:PDRG1 protein, human; D011506:Proteins; C497206:MDM2 protein, human; D051736:Proto-Oncogene Proteins c-mdm2